Vampire in Atlantis (41 page)

Read Vampire in Atlantis Online

Authors: Alyssa Day

Tags: #Romance, #Contemporary, #General, #Paranormal, #Fiction

BOOK: Vampire in Atlantis
2.93Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
He’d promised to save her, and now he was already failing. No. Not again.
“Not again,” he shouted, and her eyes flew open.
She stared at him from eyes gone fully dark blue, again, and he was afraid the magic had already swallowed hers, but her voice, when she spoke, was still her own.
“Daniel, it’s fine. Trust me. Open yourself to the magic, and to me. Open yourself to the power of the soul-meld and we will be stronger than even this ancient vortex magic. You have to trust me.”
He looked into her incredibly dangerous, insanely beautiful eyes, and he realized he did.
He trusted her.
He’d gladly and willingly step into the sun for her and with her.
“Yes,” he said, and he opened his soul to the magic.
It took him down with a knockout punch, funneling into him like a whirlpool of hot, bright, old—so very old—power.
“Daniel, trust me,” she said again, and he leaned forward to kiss her, because she was the only thing that had ever made sense in his entire long, hideous, immortal life. He kissed her because he had to kiss her; because kissing her was his only reason for living.
She kissed him back, and the power exploded through them, between them, roared its way into every dark place in his heart and soul and purified them as it bound them together even more tightly than they had been before. He laughed and she cried and then they both laughed while the power soared through them, amplifying their emotions, intensifying their magics, and expanding their understanding of the universe.
When she finally nodded, he closed his mind to the onslaught, and the vortex energy gracefully surrendered, not a ravaging conqueror after all, but a healer, a magician, a wizard come to play and depart. A lifetime encapsulated into a handful of minutes, and he would never, ever be the same.
He looked at Serai, and her eyes were pure, glowing blue fire.
“Your eyes,” they said simultaneously, and she laughed and touched his face with her hand.
“Your eyes are glowing like sea sapphires,” she said, awed. “But where did the red go?”
“Yours are glowing, too,
mi amara
, and I am in awe of your beauty.”
She kissed him again, and this time the kiss was more than just a kiss, since the magic in each of them resonated, one with the other, and he could feel what she felt, even as the Emperor itself decided to join in the fun and send a bolt of its power driving through Serai.
“The women—your sisters,” he said. “I can feel them.”
“Yes. Yes!” She tightened her grasp on his hands and concentrated, hard. He could feel her focus, and together they somehow channeled a beam of pure energy across the land, down through the ocean’s depths, and into the three maidens waiting in their crystal cases in Atlantis.
Serai cried out, but it was a joyous cry, and she threw her arms around him. “We did it! Did you feel that? We strengthened them! They’re better, Daniel, oh, they’re stronger now, and we did it. They’ll be safe for a little while longer, until we find the Emperor. We
are
better together than apart. There will be no more talk, ever, of us leaving each other or being better off without the other. Agreed?”
He hugged her back and started to answer, but an unexpected sound, a harsh grinding noise, scraped across his eardrums, and instead he held a finger to her lips and listened with his vampire senses on high alert.
It was—It couldn’t be. He listened harder, instinctively pushing Serai behind him.
It was the sound of tramping feet and the roar of helicopters. He had a crazy flashback to another invading army, eleven thousand years ago, and then shook his head to clear it of those images.
“It sounds like the army is on its way, and we’re still trapped in here by the sun for a little while longer,” he told Serai. “This isn’t good.”
Her face drained of color, but she squared her shoulders and nodded. “It wouldn’t be fun if it were easy,” she said, and he started laughing.
“Oh, Princess. You are absolutely the right woman for me.”
Chapter
32
 
 
Nicholas heard them first, long before Ivy’s human ears picked up any disturbance. It was barely dusk, and the apprentice had finally arrived, dragged by his ears all the way, one would think from the way he was sniveling. Ivy had tried to comfort him at first, promising him he wouldn’t be hurt, but she’d finally given up in disgust.
Even Ian had rolled his eyes after the first ten minutes or so and told the witch to “man up, dude.”
“We’re in trouble,” Nicholas said. He pointed to the man, Phillips or Phelps or whatever. “Shut up, now, or I’ll kill you myself.”
Phillips shut up, cramming his fist in his mouth to do it.
Ian shot Nicholas a hard look. “He’s a clerk in the New Age shop down by Tuzigoot, not exactly a hard-ass. Scaring him even more isn’t going to help.”
“Shut up and listen.”
Ian, astonishingly enough for a thirteen-year-old boy, actually shut up and listened. Five seconds later, he ran to his mother and took her arm.
“Mom, it’s gotta be the army. Holy crap, it really is the army coming to rescue us!”
Ivy and Nicholas shared a grim look over Ian’s head. If the army were on its way, the last thing they’d have in mind would be rescuing a witch from a vampire. More likely, they were after the power source of the King stone and would kill all of them to get it. Nicholas had heard rumors that the P-Ops Division was corrupt all the way to the top, and now he might be soon to gain confirmation firsthand.
“Hey, I lied, Phil,” Ivy said tiredly. “You’re probably going to get hurt.”
The man started wailing again, so Nicholas strode across the cave and casually backhanded him to shut him up. Phil’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he slumped to the ground.
“That’s better. Now maybe I can think.” Nicholas walked over to the box that held the gem and stared down at it as if the amethyst itself would give him a clue as to what to do next. They’d been on the verge of trying one final experiment to see if they could learn what the King stone really could do, when the stone had begun glowing on its own, shooting out a beam of light so strong that Nicholas was surprised it hadn’t cut straight through the stone cavern wall. Ivy told him that it wasn’t just light, either; the stone had been projecting magical energy at a level far more intense than anything she’d seen from it thus far.
“What can we do?” Ivy asked now, holding tight to Ian’s arm. “You promised to keep my son safe, vampire, and it’s dark enough that you can escape with him in a few minutes. I’ll stay here and deal with the army.”
“I won’t leave you, Mom,” Ian protested, and she ignored him as if he’d never even spoken, still staring steadily at Nicholas.
“I won’t leave you, either,” Nicholas said, leaving her to interpret it as she would. “We’ll all get out of here. The members of my blood pride should be here any minute to assist us.”
“Why did you send the guy away who brought Phil? He was human. The sunlight wouldn’t have bothered him.”
“More witnesses I didn’t need. Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.”
The voice that shattered the silence, transmitted by some kind of electronic device, carried a weight of authority and command that didn’t bode well for their plans.
“This is Colonel Brig St. Ives of the federal P-Ops Division speaking. We have you surrounded, and we have captured your vampire associates, twelve in total. Please come out, sending Mr. Smithson out first, and nobody will get hurt.”
An even dozen had been all the members of his blood pride on this mission with him. This could be a slight problem.
“Whoops,” Ian said, grinning and almost jumping out of his skin with adrenaline and a sick kind of excitement. “Wonder if they’d accept parts of him? His spleen might be around here somewhere.”
Ivy pulled her son closer, her wild eyes fixed on Nicholas as if he were her savior instead of her killer. In spite of everything, he wanted to do just that. Save her. Protect her. Try again later. Forget the damn King stone and everything it might be able to do.
He focused on Ivy so intently that he missed it when Phil, who’d apparently been feigning unconsciousness, made his break, and by the time he realized the man was running out the entrance, it was too late to bother.
“Thank goodness you’re here,” Phil screamed. “I’m a hostage, I’m here, help me, help me—”
An explosion of gunfire cut off the rest of Phil’s plea for help, and Ivy screamed. Nicholas flashed over to the cave entrance and peered out into the gathering dusk, only to see Phil’s nearly disintegrated body.
“Interesting interpretation of ‘nobody will get hurt,’” Nicholas said. “Maybe we should rethink our options.”
Ivy picked up the Emperor and smiled, a wild glee darkening her eyes. “They’re wrong if they think nobody will get hurt. They’re a danger to my son. I’m going to bring them a world of hurt.”
Nicholas bared his fangs and snarled his agreement, and then he smiled. “You, beautiful witch, are my kind of woman.”
Chapter
33
 
 
Daniel shot out of the cave like a bat out of the worst of the nine hells the second the sun finally hid behind the horizon. Now that he and Serai were connected by the soul-meld and the vortex magic, he could feel the Emperor almost as intensely as she could.
Which meant he could leave her safely behind while he went after it.
Unfortunately, she had no intention of letting him do anything of the kind. By the time he turned around, she was already down the carved stone side of the cliff and standing on the ground, hands on her hips, staring up at him.
“You can forget that idea right now,” she informed him.
“Did the soul-meld give you psychic powers? And if so, can you snoop in everybody’s brain or just mine?” He landed next to her and stared her down with his fiercest glare.
Also unfortunately, she wasn’t intimidated in the least.
“You know, you’re kind of sexy when you scowl like that,” she said, flashing a seductive smile, and then blinking innocently when he growled at her.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Was that meant to frighten me into staying here, cowering in the corner like a good little princess?”
He shook his head and gave it up as a lost cause. “I’ve been around long enough to know defeat when it smacks me in the face. Let’s go. We need to find out why the army or P-Ops or who-the-hells-ever is heading in the same direction as the Emperor.”
“I have never believed in coincidence,” she said, braiding her hair back from her face.
“Neither have I.”
She bent to retrieve the backpack and he stopped her. “No need for it now. If we succeed, we can stop back and retrieve it if we need to hike out of here. Do you think you could be up for flying—no pun intended—if we have to do it to escape?”
She frowned but then nodded slowly. “You know, I have your magic inside me now, as well as my own. That should surely sustain me long enough to fly away from danger with the Emperor. And I have no time to harbor childish fears.”

Other books

Wet: Overflow by Zenobia Renquist
The Plagiarist by Howey, Hugh
Davin's Quest by D'Arc, Bianca
My Calling by Lyssa Layne
The Same Sky by Amanda Eyre Ward
Water Sleeps by Cook, Glen
Death in the City by Kyle Giroux
Destiny Disrupted by Sherry Soule